Thyme of Death (4 page)

Bubba Harris, who has been chief for
at least a decade, is a good old boy in his early fifties, slow-moving and
slow-talking, with a Lone Star Beer belly that rolls out over his Lone Star
belt buckle. His brown hair is going gray and he sucks on an oversize
cigar—never lit—that dwarfs the other features in his jowled, meaty face.
Unfortunately, I can’t look at Bubba without thinking of Jackie Gleason in
Smoky
and the Bandit.
But underneath Bubba’s overstuffed, rednecked exterior,
there’s a steely hardness that comes from a longtime, sure-fisted control of
his town. In Texas, only one serious crime in every five is cleared by arrest.
But the police in Pecan Springs clear something like four out of five,
according to my friend McQuaid, a former Houston homicide detective who now
teaches in the criminal justice department at Central Texas State University.
Bubba’s in charge and he knows it. So does almost everybody else.

Bubba glanced up. It took him a
minute to place me,
but when he did, his cigar twitched and he pulled his dark brows
together in a heavy frown. When I opened the shop, we’d had a discussion about
whether selling medicinal herbs amounted to practicing medicine without a
license. I pointed out my sign, which read, “I am not qualified nor does the
law permit me to diagnose or treat your medical problem.” This is an issue
these days, and I aim to be clear on it. I’m glad to sell people what they ask
for or refer them to reliable texts. But that’s where I have to draw the line,
and that’s what I told Bubba. It probably isn’t too often that he comes up
against a five-foot-six, hundred-and-forty-pound female who knows the law and
talks back. He remembered me. And he knew that I was a friend of Jo’s, too.

Ruby also talks back. “It wasn’t
suicide,” she said emphatically. Her voice was pitched too high and she
swallowed, making an effort to bring it down a notch. “Jo wouldn’t kill
herself.”

Bubba rolled his cigar from one side
of his face to the other and regarded Ruby. “Accident, you figure? Could be she
didn’t know what would happen if she mixed pills and booze. But what about the
note?”

“What does it say?” I asked.

Bubba bent over and looked, not
touching it. “I’m sorry about what I said. It wasn’t what I intended. Please
forgive me.’“

Ruby bent over and looked too. “It’s
not signed. And it doesn’t say who it’s to.”

“Her handwriting?”

Ruby straightened up. “I don’t know,”
she said doubtfully. “Maybe.”

“We’ll check it out,” Bubba said. He
switched his cigar to the other side of his mouth. “Looks like suicide to me.”

“No,” Ruby said. “I mean...” She
waved her arms, an agitated butterfly. “I mean, Jo Gilbert was working to
heal
herself. She didn’t like medicine. She especially didn’t like sleeping
pills. She wouldn’t have taken any, much less enough to kill herself.”

Bubba’s brows came together. “The
lady was terminal, wasn’t she? Seems like what I heard around town.”

“She had cancer,” Ruby admitted. “But
she’d never give up. Never.” She gulped and turned helplessly away from the
loose bundle of cooling flesh. “Never.”

I looked down at the empty pill
bottle on the table. Like Ruby, I didn’t want to believe that Jo could have
killed herself. But there was a part of me that was trained to assess evidence
and draw valid, verifiable conclusions. Like it or not, that part had to admit that
the worsening pain of cancer or the fear of being a helpless burden on her
daughter and her friends might have pushed Jo into doing something otherwise
unthinkable. A handful of sleeping pills, a couple of strong Bloody Marys to
wash them down, might have seemed the most reasonable way out of an altogether
unreasonable illness. She’d been depressed lately, and today was her birthday.
Perhaps it had seemed a symbolic day on which to bring her life to a close.

“Well, then, mebbe an accident,”
Bubba said. “Say she took a few pills, had a drink, got dopey, took a few more.
It’s happened before.”

“But she wouldn’t take the pills in
the
first
place,” Ruby insisted.

Bubba shrugged. “We’ll see what the
J.P. has to say.” I made a face. In Texas, a justice of the peace is required
to attend and rule on all suspicious deaths, although most aren’t trained for
the task.

He jerked his head toward the
kitchen. “The daughter’s back there. Whyn’t y’all see if she needs anythin’. I’ll
call Watson’s Funeral Home to come and take care of bidness.” That’s the way
all good old boys pronounce “business” in Texas, even the ones who’ve promoted
themselves into gov’ment bidness and gone to Washington. I used to wonder
whether they’d admit me to the club if I took to saying it. When I realized I
was tempted to test out the theory, I knew it was time for a career change.

Bubba turned to the telephone. Ruby
and I had been dismissed. I gave her a little shove and we went down the dark
hallway toward the back of the house.

Meredith was sitting at the
oilcloth-covered table in Jo’s pleasantly old-fashioned kitchen, her head on
her folded arms. The room was dusky and a red enameled teakettle chirruped
merrily on the gas stove. A white cake carton sat on the yellow formica
counter, beside a box of birthday candles and the calico goose. I turned off
the teakettle and turned on the light over the sink. One end of the fluorescent
tube glowed, the other flickered fitfully. Jo had been meaning to replace the
ballast.

Ruby bent over Meredith. “Meredith,”
she said in a whisper, “I’m so sorry.”

“Yes,” I said, low. But sorry didn’t
cut it. Sorry didn’t begin to describe the sadness and loss I felt, standing in
Jo’s familiar yellow-painted kitchen, her birthday cake and Fuck-the-Airport!
goose on the counter, while the funeral home was coming to handle the “bidness”
of taking her body to the Adams County Hospital, where some doctor would cut
her up and tell us what killed her. But what else was there to say?

Meredith raised her head, stricken. “I
didn’t even know she
had
any sleeping pills.”

“And I never saw her take more than
one drink,” Ruby said.

Meredith leaned against Ruby. “She
had a bout with hepatitis once. She always went easy on booze. The last time I
saw that Smirnoff bottle, it was better than half full.” She paused. “I didn’t
know she had any of that Hot Shot stuff, either. She liked to drink it for
breakfast. She said it woke her up. But we ran out, and the liquor store was
out of it.” Her pale face looked pinched and blue under the flickering
fluorescent light and her cheeks were furrowed with tears. “But it’s the pills
that bother me. She must have bought them just for... this.”

Ruby looked shocked. “Jo? Buy pills?”
She shook
her head firmly. “She was into self-hypnosis. She refused to take
anything chemical to knock her out or cut the pain. She wouldn’t use pills.”

I opened the cupboard where Jo kept
the cups, neatly hung from hooks. I couldn’t see where all this denial was
getting us. Jo’s dying left a cold, empty place where something alive and vital
had lived. But evading it wouldn’t bring her back. “So what about the note?” It
certainly looked to me like a suicide note.

Ruby shook her head stubbornly. “I
don’t know. But Jo wouldn’t take the easy way out. For her, cancer was the
lesson she had to learn in this life. She wanted to
confront
it, learn
from it, not escape from it. That’s part of healing.”

I took three cups from the cupboard
and set them on the counter. When Ruby talks like this, I always feel
uncomfortable, like an atheist at a prayer meeting. Maybe it’s because I haven’t
started down the Healing Path. To do that, Ruby says, I’d have to give up my
anger at Leatha, my mother. I’ve mellowed some since I left the law, but I’m
not ready to give up my anger. It’s been part of me for so long, I’m not sure
who I’d be without it Ruby reached for Meredith’s hand. “Your mom had the
courage to choose her own way,” she whispered, “and a marvelous strength of
will. Her next life will be something special.”

I measured peppermint tea into the
teapot and poured boiling water into it, wondering if Ruby realized that her
remark could go both ways. Jo had the courage and will to commit suicide, if
that’s what she decided.

I looked at Meredith. “What about
that note?” I asked again.

Meredith rubbed her eyes with the
backs of her hands. “We had an argument this morning. You know, mother-daughter
stuff. It wasn’t really earth-shaking, but I guess it was bad enough to make
her want to apologize before she—” She shook her head, the tears coming again. “Oh,
God, I couldn’t live with myself if I thought our argument was what pushed her
into this.”

I looked at Meredith. “You’re
sure
there weren’t any pills in the house?”

She shook her head numbly. “Last
night I couldn’t sleep. I’m not into self-hypnosis, and I don’t have Mother’s
thing about chemicals. I asked if she had any. She said she didn’t.” Her face
twisted. “She must have got them this morning. Or she lied.”

“Listen, you guys,” Ruby said
urgently, “I came over yesterday afternoon and Jo and I did our regular yoga
and meditation together. I’d have known it if she was thinking of something
like ... this. But she was fine.” She closed her eyes. “She
was fine,”
she
repeated fiercely, as though she herself were responsible for the balance of Jo’s
mind.

Meredith looked at me, her gray eyes
shadowed. “But there is something odd, China. There was somebody here today.
While Ruby and I were in Austin.”

I got up and turned on the hanging
light over the table and flicked off the fluorescent. I hate those stupid
things. Even when they’re working right, they make people look like day-old
corpses. They always remind me of the light in Leatha’s kitchen and the
washed-out blue of her face when she’d been drinking. “Who?” I asked. “Who was
here?”

“I don’t know. I came in the back
way, because I had Mother’s cake and your present and I wanted to surprise her.
Then I went into the living room and found...” She paused and swallowed,
reaching deep inside for control. A moment later, calmer, she went on. “Just as
I came into the room, I got a whiff of perfume. I’m sensitive to smells, but I
couldn’t identify it. Something exotic.”

“I didn’t smell any perfume,” I
said.

“Not now, you wouldn’t.” Meredith
rotated her shoulders wearily and Ruby got up and moved behind her, kneading
her shoulder blades with the tips of her fingers, to save her orangy-red nails.
“It was just the barest whiff. It was gone the second I opened the door. And
then I found Mother, and the paramedics came and tried to revive her, and when
they said she was dead they called that awful policeman who smells like damp
cigars.” She made a wry mourn. “Thank God he isn’t
smoking
the damned thing.”

I frowned. From the look of it, Jo
had to have taken the pills soon after Meredith and Ruby had left this morning.
But acccording to Meredith, she didn’t have any to take, and no Bloody Mary
mix. Had somebody else brought the pills and the Hot Shot? A speculative
question, no clear-cut answer. I’d been taught in law school to go for the most
obvious, least debatable answer first. And the most obvious answer was that Jo
had put Hot Shot on the grocery list and lied to her daughter about not having
sleeping pills. It wouldn’t be the first time a mother lied to her daughter.

“I’m not trying to say Mother didn’t
do it,” Meredith said. “She’d been down for the past few weeks. Who wouldn’t
be, with the cancer, and the pain, and the bills. She was pretty depressed.”

Ruby’s lips tightened. “Will you
knock off the depression shit? Sure, she was frustrated at not feeling better.
But she wasn’t the kind of woman who’d kill herself over a little pain. And not
over a few bills, either.”

Meredith straightened her shoulders
and fished a tissue out of her pocket. She blew her nose with the grim
determination of someone who’s decided not to cry anymore. “You’re right, Ruby,”
she said. “Mother and I weren’t close, even after Daddy left and there were
just the two of us. But at least I know her that well. Mother hated to give in.”

“What was he like, your dad?” I
asked, realizing I didn’t know much about Jo’s life. She’d moved to Pecan
Springs from the South Side of Chicago fifteen years ago, that much I knew. But
that was all.

Meredith shrugged. ‘Typical
blue-collar, patriarchal. He worked in the mills and he didn’t want her to
work. He thought she should stay home and take care of me and cook his meals
and iron his work clothes and pack his lunch bucket.”

“Wow,” Ruby said incredulously. “Jo
was married to a man like
that?’

Meredith laughed. “Until the summer
I was fourteen. That’s when they divorced. I remember them arguing about the
ERA, and about women coming over to the house to organize a chapter of NOW. And
once Dad got really ticked off because Betty Friedan came to Chicago and Mother
took me to hear her. Then one day he packed up and left and there were just the
two of us.” She blew her nose again. “I thought we’d be closer after that, but
it never happened. Oh, Mother was good to me. She made a good home and all
that.” She smiled mistily. “She even baked cookies. But I always had the
feeling she took care of me because she was doing her duty, not because she
found a lot of joy in it. I hope that doesn’t sound too awful,” she added. “Maybe
she wasn’t really like that. Maybe that’s just my stuff.”